It's the first day of October, Halloween is right around the corner, and that means it's time to desensitize ourselves with an overabundance of horror movies!

October Horror Movie Challenge!

Last year we did a thread like this, and I hadn't seen a new one pop up yet, so I thought I'd do the honors. We managed to get a lot of good discussions, and some good recommendations, so hopefully that trend will continue.

The rules are simple: every day, watch a horror movie, or try to watch at least 31 by Halloween. Use this thread to keep track of your progress, and please leave a small review (at least). Feel free to discuss, ask for recommendations, etc.

Slashers
The Town that Dreaded Sundown
We Are What We Are
You're Next
A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge
Texas Chainsaw
Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood
Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer
American Psycho
Scream
Scream 2
*Silence of the Lambs
Maniac (2012)
Children of the Corn
Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers
Bay of Blood
Return to Horror High

Ghosts/Supernatural
Dark Touch
Rigor Mortis
Dead Silence
The Innkeepers
The Legend of Hell House
The Blair Witch Project
The Awakening
The Frighteners
Grave Encounters
House
Candyman
The Serpent and the Rainbow
The Pact
House on Haunted Hill (1959)
Ju-On: The GrudgeCarnival of Souls

Vampires
Shadow of the Vampire
From Dusk Till Dawn
Lair of the White Worm
Fright Night (1985)
*Nosferatu
Bram Stoker's Dracula
Let the Right One In
Stake Land
Vampire in Brooklyn

Horror Comedy
Tucker & Dale vs. Evil
The Cabin in the Woods
John Dies At The End
I Sell the Dead
A Fantastic Fear of Everything

Family Friendly
ParaNorman
*The Addams Family
*Ghostbusters
Are You Afraid of the Dark? (only on Amazon Prime)
Goosebumps
Courage the Cowardly Dog
The Hole
The Little Ghost

Documentaries
Never Sleep Again: The Elm Street Legacy
Best Worst Movie
Nightmares in Red, White & Blue
Machete Maidens Unleashed
The American Scream
Doc of the Dead
Birth of the Living Dead
Nightmare FactoryA History of Horror with Mark Gatiss

Mystery Science Theater 3000
*Werewolf
Gamera Vs. Guiron
Future War
*Laserblast
The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies
Night of the Blood Beast
Devil Fish
The Atomic Brain
The Phantom Planet
Gamera Vs. Barugon
The Unearthly
Beginning of the End

Only On HBO Go
The Conjuring
The Purge
Red Dragon
Tales from the Crypt: Bordello of Blood
The Hills Have Eyes (remake)
The Fury

Only on Hulu Plus
Cannibal Holocaust
Scanners
Antichrist
Eraserhead
House (1977)
The Blob (1958)
Vampyr
Godzilla, King of the Monsters!
House on Haunted Hill (Rifftrax)
Puppet Master

The greatest sensual pleasure there is is to know the desires of another!

Fun Shoe

I'm not going to list all 30 movies right here, I'll post every few days as I watch stuff.

Oct. 1st - Creepshow: I'm kicking things off with anthologies and the Creepshow movies were my first exposure to this genre. The most memorable story in the first entry is probably Leslie Neilson playing a psychopathic villain in "Something to Tide You Over". I've always had a soft spot for the zombie-father in the first story though, I love the effects on him.

October 2nd - Body Bags: I just bought this blind on Blu-ray based on the Carpenter name, and I'm hoping I wont be disappointed.

October 3rd - Creepshow 2: I'm in the minority that prefers Creepshow 2 to the first. I love both but the decider here is The Raft, which scared the poo poo out of me when I first saw it and still unnerves me every time I watch it.

October 4th - Necronomicon: I just discovered this anthology last year, and it was instantly one of my favorites. I just love the idea of a Lovecraft themed anthology, and this movie delivers. Also Jeffrey Combs.

October 5th - Chillerama: This movie is disgusting and hilarious and I love it. Probably the only movie in this list that forces me to physically turn away from the screen at certain moments.

October 6th - Trick r Treat: The "main event", and my favorite horror anthology of all-time. This movie has it all, its very funny and yet still legitimately scary in parts, and the stories all weave together seamlessly in a way that most other anthologies don't even attempt. A modern classic as far as I'm concerned.

Like last year I'm gonna try and average one a day. There will be days I watch nothing but I'll make up for it. Last year I really didn't see all that many good horror movies but the few good ones still made this worth it.

One time a guy stole some downhill skis out of my jeep and I was so mad I punched a mailbox. I'm against crime, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

Interesting to note that AMC hasn't announced anything this year. Last year they showed tons of horror films but this year they don't have much scheduled. Gotta make room for those Walking Dead marathons I guess.

Interesting to note that AMC hasn't announced anything this year. Last year they showed tons of horror films but this year they don't have much scheduled. Gotta make room for those Walking Dead marathons I guess.

I feel like thanks to the internet the days of Cable (and therefore edited) horror marathons are pretty dead.

I'm not planning to on getting a full 31 this year - managed to do that last October - but I hope it's still cool to post in this thread. I've got the Universal Classic Monsters blu-ray set on the way - shamefully, I've not seen a single one of them... but that just means I'll have a lot of quality classics to go through!

Started off with Honeymoon. Some pretty tense scenes like the first time he goes into the forest at night even though the general storyline was pretty old hat.
A solid start, for sure.
And then I watched Willow Creek. God drat, the scene in the tent seemed to last an eternity and I was on the edge of my seat through all of it. That part was way better than anything that came before or after it though, but I think it was all worth it for that.

I'm not planning to on getting a full 31 this year - managed to do that last October - but I hope it's still cool to post in this thread. I've got the Universal Classic Monsters blu-ray set on the way - shamefully, I've not seen a single one of them... but that just means I'll have a lot of quality classics to go through!

You're more than welcome to post what you watch in here. I'm not trying to nit-pick, it's supposed to be a fun challenge (I only managed to get to twenty-something last year).

And I'm very jealous that you've never seen the Universal Monster Movies. Bride of Frankenstein and The Wolf Man are fantastic, and are two of my favorite horror movies. Please let us know what you think of them after you watch them.

IS IT WRONG THAT I ONCE WROTE A HORROR STORY ABOUT THE BUDDIES? YOU KNOW, THE TALKING PUPPIES?

I watched a found footage movie called Evidence which I like the ideas more than the execution. It opens with the police finding the aftermath of a massacre at an old abandoned gas station. They find some cameras and take the footage back and edit it together to try figure out who did it. I was never bored watching the movie but the shaky cam crap was really annoying and pretty much killed the suspense of any stalk / chase scene.
I did like the ending and the whole reveal of who was behind the murders.
Also it did have one or two moments that worked, the best shot in the movie is in the trailer. As I said, I liked the idea better than the execution.

I watched The Legend of Hell House last night for the first time and enjoyed it. It is 1973 as gently caress in terms of style and looks pretty good. I love Roddy McDowall a lot and he's great in this, almost every memorable scene involves his character.

Very happy to see this topic pop up! I'm still planning out my list of what to watch all this month, but...I knew exactly what to watch first, the George A. Romero classic, CREEPSHOW (1982). I didn't much like the movie when I was a kid for some reason(I was dumb!), but I will most def. continue to include Creepshow in every October Marathon going forward. I really enjoyed 'The Crate' and '...Creeping Up On You' the most. Fritz Weaver, my favorite Twilight Zone alumni, is such a treat when he gets into his "YOU'VE GOT TO BELIEVE ME" mode in 'The Crate'. The last segment is just so creepy with excellent production design in that white penthouse. I mark big for the scene at the door's peep hole where we only see Mr. White's creepy smile and hear the sing-song-ish tone of his voice. Oh, man, I just loved Creepshow. Excellent film to start off October with!

Thinking of taking in another film tonight, perhaps Trick 'R Treat or maybe another Romero flick like Martin. Who knows!

I'm only watching movies I haven't seen yet this year. I'm forcing myself to watch a bunch of stuff I've had lying around forever.

Not too enthusiastic for them, but this includes Zombie rear end, the two Tetsuo sequels, and Fearsome Vampire Killers.

I'm also watching some films people have good things to say about, such as Children of the Corn, Abominable Dr. Phibes, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Monster Squad, and Pit and the Pendulum. Hopefully the good ones balance out the poo poo.

I'm so stoked about this. Except for the Halloween series (which I have to watch every year), I want to try to watch things that I haven't seen before. I'm starting with Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer tonight, and probably moving on to Creepshow tomorrow.

I'm gonna try it this year. I'm using it to rewatch a lot of classics I haven't seen in a while and catch up on some new horror I've neglected. I got my hands on a copy of The Town That Dreaded Sundown a while ago and have been saving it for October.

Since I've gotten so lazy over the years, and Netflix has actually been adding a lot of decent horror, I think I'm actually going to be able to fill my list entirely with movies I've never seen before. Today I started with Invaders from Mars, the Tope Hooper remake. Tomorrow? Who knows.

A man screaming "You're so evil because you're short!" to exorcise a ghost is ridiculous.

Oh yeah, the ending is complete nonsense but I think it's an enjoyable kind of nonsense. McDowall's whole spiel with the yelling at a ghost about how he's a bastard and he was 5'2 is amazing, but the best part is easily when he takes out a knife and cuts open the corpse's pants to reveal that he has prosthetic leg.

I started with Detention, assuming it would be a horror movie. It wasn't... although it kind of sort of was? Whatever it was, I want to travel to the alternate dimension where movies like that get greenlit because that was not made in the same universe I grew up in holy poo poo.

I started with the Spanish version of Dracula. I've been curious about this one for a while and glad I finally got a chance to see it. With such extra running time I was worried it may run out of steam, but it was still a tightly packed ride that used the opportunity to flesh out the characters a bit more than we see in the English version. If the English version was as well rounded, and kept Bela as the count, it would have been even more amazing.

Great gore with a black comic edge. Great cast including Elizabeth Banks in one of her early roles, Michael Rooker (Merle from The Walking Dead), Nathan Fillion and even a cameo from Jenna Fischer. This movie is a lot of fun, and thankfully doesn't take itself too seriously. Great special effects! Not particularly scary.

Since I've gotten so lazy over the years, and Netflix has actually been adding a lot of decent horror, I think I'm actually going to be able to fill my list entirely with movies I've never seen before. Today I started with Invaders from Mars, the Tope Hooper remake. Tomorrow? Who knows.

I plan on doing this as well; part of the problem I had with past years was simply finding a horror film to watch got to be a bit of a task in and of itself. Now, I'm probably going to browse Netflix for most of my horror watches.

Kicked this off tonight, here's my list right now. Tonight we started with House of Wax, great film, the tension was really high throughout, the mask work on Price would have been great even now, and Price himself is god damned amazing in it. Tomorrow is Gojira, which is a wee bit of a cheat but should be good.

So Gojira. It's been quite a while since I saw the American version but I know that I felt that inserting Burr into the film did a lot of damage to it. The narrative bridges are clunky, the inserts aren't effective, and taking away focus from the Japanese characters does a disservice to the film. Seeing it in the original Japanese, without heavy editing, and with a proper translation was worlds apart.

As I watched, I mused on whether Gojira was a horror film. In the fifties the presence of a monster was enough to call something a horror movie, but pop culture is flooded with monsters now. Just because there's monsters in the 2014 Godzilla doesn't mean it's a horror film. Gojira is clearly a SF movie, its links to popular SF at the time are really blatant and would be exactly the kind of thing you'd find in a Gernsback SF magazine of forties. And Gojira wears its allegory on its sleeve; you'd have to be brain dead to not see how a Japanese movie goer in 1953 wouldn't be disturbed. But just because it could horrify in 1953 doesn't mean that it's a horror movie today.

And as I sat there debating this topic and the shifting nature of genres in my head, I reached the scene where Godzilla attacks Tokyo and uses his atomic breathe.

Going back to Godzilla 2014, it's sterile. There's visual chaos and destruction but in the end lives aren't shattered, people don't struggle with how to deal with the consequences, there's no impact. We see people scared by the attack but it's scared like being on a roller coaster at an amusement park. Buildings are smashed but there are no real emotional consequences. And this is replicated with a lot of the big action movies in recent years. There are monsters, but they're nothing that we should be terrified of.

The attack scenes before this were visceral but not to the same extent. A smashed train and bridge. Some unfortunate passengers stepped on, out of sight. Then this scene comes along and Godzilla incinerates a street full of people in a shot that might as well have had a sign that said, "Just like the atomic bomb!" A woman cowers in a doorway holder her children and saying they'll soon be with daddy as embers from the burning city fall around them. There's no blood visible on screen, but this is not some bloodless romp.

I don't think I can really call Gojira scary, but it's definitely effective.

(Oh, and those kids cowering the doorway? They survive... and it's implied that they get radiation poisoning.)

Oh cool, I'll be interested in hearing what you think about it in the context of a horror movie.

I was planning on holding off to avoid watching too many similar films close together, but I may watch Donovon's Brain tomorrow night. It's also a 1953 film that has a strong SF element while considered at the time a horror film. Stephen King called it one of the most significant horror movies, but he wrote that about it in 1980 right when horror as a genre really started shifting.

Random Stranger fucked around with this message at Oct 2, 2014 around 03:15

One time a guy stole some downhill skis out of my jeep and I was so mad I punched a mailbox. I'm against crime, and I'm not ashamed to admit it.

I'm definitely in this year. I'm mostly watching things I own and have seen before, and I'll be scouring Netflix and TV to round out my choices.

Movie 1: The Devils Rejects

Thought I'd kick the month off with a little Rob Zombie. I'll be watching at least one more of his this month. This movie is a great example of twisting audience perceptions in characters. The antagonists gradually become protagonists and vice versa. We witness the Firefly family commit various atrocities, but by the end we're rooting for them to escape the authorities. This movie is uncomfortably violent and extremely gory. The torturing of the band members is particularly difficult to watch. With that said, the violence never comes off as exploitative. Every scene makes you hate a character a bit more and want to see revenge. Ultimately though, it is redemption and not revenge that drives this film. Highly recommended.

I've never managed to stick with one of these threads, but tonight I realized I had a copy of From Beyond lying around, and figured what the hell. Let's do this!

Oct. 1: From Beyond

Having never seen this before, I had really no idea what to expect. I'd seen a couple of Stuart Gordon's other films, but then I really wasn't expecting this even closely resemble Robot Jox...

This movie sits at a weird crossroads between disgusting body horror and kitschy mad scientist movies. (It's based on a Lovecraft story, so I guess that's to be expected.) For the most part, I enjoyed it. I kind of wish the film had explored more of its sexual overtones, to be honest. "These experiments affect the pineal gland! The pineal gland affects the sex drive! Hey, what's with all this bondage gear?" You could argue that the sexual stuff takes a backseat to Jeffrey Combs' character completely losing touch with his humanity. Combs is a crazy kind of brilliant, too, especially in the back half of the film after he's gone bald, grown a third eye and just starts chomping down on body parts. He has one of those wild-eyed stares that was made for horror. The creature effects look like distinct precursors to a lot of what James Gunn does with Slither, and man, as gross as some of it is, so many of the creature scenes are gorgeous. This one's a keeper.

I was expecting something along the lines of Megan is Missing, and to come in here being all like "no gently caress this movie why do you all like this garbage so much," but I was pleasantly surprised. This isn't a morality play or even really all that exploitative; what it is, however, is Lovecraftian horror about humankind attempting to know the unknowable and being punished by cosmic forces for it.

The one thing I really hate about this movie is the last minute and a half or so. It was a lot more interesting when the villains were faceless ghosts, sprung up from the internet to enact vengeance on the interloper for attempting to study it (and inevitably tame it), than when it was revealed as a Hostel-type deal. The movie up to that point felt like a millenial take on Videodrome, but that last little bit undermined it and really brought me down.

That said, I'm still pretty sure this is one of the only cyberpunk horror movies ever made (and it briefly steals the visual style of the other big one, Tetsuo: the Iron Man (1989) [dir. Shinya Tsukamoto, d.p. Kei Fujiwara], for a couple of shots!) so I can dig it. It's tense as gently caress, it's incredibly dark and mean (the comic relief is a man on a bicycle getting splattered by a truck), and it's probably one of the most interesting horror flicks of the last few years.

Final Grade: B

Closing Thoughts:

- Seriously, this movie is fantastic at doing black comedy when it wants to.

- This probably would have been an A or A+, except that it chickens out on its premise at the last second in favor of a more mundane and less interesting one.

- This movie is really goddamn uncomfortable to watch. It's not really scary (though there's a couple of jump scares), it's just really good at building an atmosphere of overbearing dread.

I opened the month (my favourite of all months) with The Lords of Salem. I think its foreboding sense of autumnul doom is the perfect way to kick off the month. I'm not a Rob Zombie fan at all, but I find this movie to be a refreshing departure from his other stuff: Sherri Moon Zombie does a great job in the lead role, all the other characters are strong, and the sense of atmosphere is built up really well, so that when poo poo gets nuts, it feels earned rather than gratuitous. Plus, that song is haunting. Great way to kick off the month!

Hey I'm going to do a horror movie stream this month, is it appropriate to post it in here? I'm going to show at least 24 films. I don't think it's worth making its own thread but it seems like it fits this one? Idk.

I also watched this tonight and I'll post more later but I just want to say that I felt the opposite. I wasn't fully on board until the ending. Contextualizing the whole thing as a crappy little porn site complete with lovely animated gif banner ads and bullet points of features of the videos brought the whole thing home for me. It took it from something that just seemed to be about how horrible the internet was (a noble message) to something more broadly about the sexual exploitation of people for profit online. It brougth the ridiculousness of the movie and just sort it tied it down to a mundane reality and I found it really effective. I really love that last shot of the kid walking in on his dad starting to watch a snuff film and him just quickly closing the window like he had been caught looking at porn.

The Den is Internet the Movie and I think the ending brings the whole thing to its logical conclusion. That being said, the opinion that the film may have been better without that last part is very plausible.